April Fool

Here amongst this august gathering, or should I say, April gathering, of bards and bardettes, this vernal gorsedd, I feel somewhat like a Big Issue seller at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, or like a eunuch in a brothel - a little impotent, if not impudent, as one might say.

I am told that I would not recognise poetry if it climbed into a four ton truck and drove over me. This is probably true. My voice does not spin and turn with precise metre, would not know assonance from alliteration, or an ass from a donkey if it comes to that; it does not dance and sing with neat back-bent devices or concealed conceits, it is totally and completely prosaic; it is, to put it bluntly, pedestrian.

But there is a poetry that I do know. The poetry of sunrises and sunsets. The poetry of a dancing waterfall full bursting with spring spate; of a bird sudden on the wing; of a quiet settled on a valley, or the burst of a wave on a rock. The poetry of a moment of kindness, or of a smile spreading over a face. The poetry of a look in a lover's eye, or of a workman stepped back from his job when he knows it is well done. These each and every one is a poem written well with the deepest of words, if we do but read them.

'Tis said that an April fool was one who still believed that the year began on April the first when it had been moved to January; one who cannot see what is now so, one who does not know what counts as the truth when the truth is shifted by fashion, or by trickery, by decree or by guile, by stealth or by design, by fraud or by usurpation, which is why we trick and fool them, to show their gullibility and our wit and nous by contrast.

I may not have the wit to know what it is fashionable to say, or the nous to know when to be quiet and so hide my ignorance of the correct pose or forms to adopt; but then I am a fool, a fool besotted by life's deeper words, by that poetry of time and place, of accident and incident, of life's hapenstance and life's irreverence of our intentions. I stand nothing but a fool perplexed and confused, made the fool indeed by life's deeper words, too often deaf to the songs it sings - and that makes me truly an April fool.

Theist v Atheist

If you take the apparent question of whether “god” exists or not as an existential question or as an ontological question then then I suspect that you will be caught in the never-ending, polarised and irresolvable debate between theist and atheist. Here I am at one with the Buddhist teaching that there are unanswerable questions.

It is not a question. It is not provable or disprovable. It cannot be resolved by any experiment or by any formal method of proof. It is beyond knowing. It is not a thing of the mind nor can it be captured by any web of words. It is deeper and is visceral in its intelligence. It is in how we feel and respond at the very deepest levels of being. It is when we are stripped totally bare and have no shield, no defence, no words, no wisdom, nothing more than the very breath we hang onto - there, that is the point where we touch the divine.

I have no wish to characterise the divine or to label it.

Such things we can experience, but the more we try to tangle them in webs of explanations, the more we enfold them in doctrine and belief, the more we wrap them in words like “god”, the more we try to condition and canalise them to fit in with our systems of belief and faith then the more we betray them.

Christianity, Buddhism, atheism, scientific rationalism, realism - whatever and whichever - these are just the vehicles in which we may travel for a while on our journey. We should not mistake the vehicle we are travelling in with the journey that we are making.

That is the most astonishing journey of all: the journey from our birth to our death.

And that journey is but a thread in a cloth woven since the beginnings of time.

At a Quaker Meeting

A moment of quiet. A collection of my thoughts - a ragbag stuffed with the past: overfull sometimes, memories spilling out of it and spitting venom at me. Then the silence of the moment begins to absorb them all like old-fashioned blotting paper. There is the sense of others settling and finding their own inner peace, of their quietening as they sit, almost radiating their inner calm.

There is something so very infectious about sitting with others in a Meeting*. That silence is not yours, not theirs – it is something other; something shared and created, and at times tangible; a bit like a sheet spread over the room with each person holding a corner and helping it to unfurl and open until the whole space is enveloped.

It is in that space, in that quiet, in that stillness, that you are confronted – confronted most by its peace, by its acceptance, by its inclusion of all, and of all that is thought, or felt, by me, by others, by, one might almost venture, the very universe itself.

The language of Meetings is old and flavoured with words that I often find hard. They are from a mindset and time that is not mine. How could it be? I have been born the other side of massive intellectual divides – The Enlightenment and the continuing revolutions in science. They are sometimes discordant and often jarring. I do not find them in the least bit easy. They are a wrapping that could so easily blind one to what is to be found within. What I find within is peace, a peace that is so meaningful, so giving of succour, so healing.

You may ask why I should go and sit, time after time, in Quaker Meetings? I am a well educated, rational, sceptical and largely atheistic person of some years – enough years to give me white hair – who has never shown any inclination towards taking part in, or tolerance of, organised religion. The answer can be given in one word: peace. That inner and outer peace. That shared peace. That peace that comes in the silence. That peace that speaks so deeply to that which is within. 

Is it comfortable? No. That peace asks questions. It demands your being and your attention. It asks of you; of who you are and of how you live; of others and how you are with them; of the world and how you add to it.

Are the Meetings full of others who are like-minded? No. Every person has their own way of seeing and of being, of believing or not believing, of speaking and of understanding; and often they are challenging to accept. But that, too, is to the good. To listen fully and deeply to their honestly spoken words; to consider them and to try to come to terms with why they are so moved; why they feel and understand as they do; what it is that has touched them; to take all of that in whilst keeping true to your own inner integrity of feeling, of thought, and of belief; that indeed is a challenge, but one that makes you grow. To only ever be surrounded by those of like-mind, although comfortable, is not wholly beneficial: if anything it is even ossifying. We need the challenge of others and their way of being to shine light into our own.

*Quakers traditionally call their meetings "Meetings for Worship"
(This is a slightly re-edited version of the one published in "The Friend" of 13 January 2012)

Houses of words

We build houses out of the words we believe so that we made hide inside them safe from the unknown, safe from the uncomfortable, safe from the threatening, safe from the questioning, safe from exposing our utter nakedness and want of coherence in the presence of a universe so vast that we cannot encompass it or comprehend it. “God” you utter and yet another brick is forced into place shielding you from all that you would keep outside. You offer me this brick and I have no idea what to do with it.

Have some regard

Have some regard for anyone who has loved you in this life, for each has loved you as best they may within the limits of who they are; and you, within your limits, have loved them too, each and every one - at least for a while, at least for a season.

Just maybe you might feel the same too?

Why I am a unitarian*:

Because of the connectedness that underlies all things.

Because of the inseparability of the material and the divine.

Because seeking and not knowing is the path.

Because all paths are as one path.

Because of the partiality of any understanding.

Because of the inexpressibility of the truth.

Because of the life-light that burns through all people.

Because of the understanding that goes beyond words.

Because of the peace that passes all understanding.

Because of the temporarily of the self.

Because of the temporarily of humanity.

"We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically" Carl Sagan

http://bit.ly/cDZhrY

 * unitarian with a small capital, not Unitarian with large one, because the word denotes a way of seeing our place in the universe and not the membership of a particular faith group - as admirable, or otherwise, as their beliefs may be.

From your first breath to your last

From your first breath to your last you will vie with the complexities of living; the multi-role-playing, many faceted torrent of each day pouring through you, like it or not. Staring blankly at a wall will not free you from this, nor from the obligations that it will trust upon you. But it was this torrent of meaning suffused life that brought you to the threshold of Zen, even for those born into traditional Buddhist societies.

It is in the dynamic tension between intelligent engagement with the everyday and meditative detachment that the path of growth lies. Each should inform the other; a dialogue between meaning and silence in which neither has the last word. Empty headed wall-staring is, ultimately, nothing more than self-indulgence - I would take a stick to anybody so obsessed.